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7 Essential Skills You Didn’t Learn in College

It’s the 21st century. Knowing how to read a novel, craft an essay, and derive the slope of a tangent isn’t enough anymore. You need to know how to swim through the data deluge, optimize your prose for Twitter, and expose statistics that lie. In the following pages, you’ll find our updated core curriculum, which fills in the gaps of your 20th-century education with the tools you need now. Call it the neoliberal arts: higher learning for highly evolved humans.

Political Science

Statistical Literacy

Why take this course?
We are misled by numbers and by our misunderstanding of probability.

What you’ll learn:
How to parse polls, play the odds, and embrace uncertainty.

e use only 10 percent of our brain! That familiar statement is false—there’s no evidence to support it. Still, something about it just sounds right, so we internalize it and repeat it. Such is the power—and danger—of statistics.

Our world is shaped by widespread statistical illiteracy. We fear things that probably won’t kill us (terrorist attacks) and ignore things that probably will (texting while driving). We buy lottery tickets. We fall prey to misleading gut instincts, which lead to biases like loss aversion—an inability to gauge risk against potential gain. The effects play out in the grocery store, the office, and the voting booth (not to mention the bedroom: People who are more risk-averse are less successful in love).

And it’s getting worse: We are now 53 percent more likely than our parents to trust polls of dubious merit. (That figure is totally made up. See?) Where do all these numbers that we remember so easily and cite so readily come from? How are they calculated, and by whom? How do we misuse them to make them say what we want them to? We’ll explore all of these questions in a sequence on sourcing statistics.

ALSO IN THIS DEPARTMENT

PERSONAL DATA

The self may be unknowable, but it isn’t untrackable. It is now easier than ever to tap into a wealth of data—heart rate, caloric input and output, foot speed, sleep patterns, even your own genetic code—to glean new insights and make better decisions about your health and behavior.

Next, this course will turn to the topic of probabilistic intuition. We’ll learn to judge what’s likely and unlikely—and what’s impossible to know. We’ll learn about distorting habits of mind like selection bias—and how to guard against them. We’ll gamble. We’ll read The Art of Probability for Scientists and Engineers by Richard Hamming, Expert Political Judgment by Philip Tetlock, and How to Cheat Your Friends at Poker by Penn Jillette and Mickey Lynn.

Finally, we’ll learn how to use statistics to our advantage. You don’t have to be an actuary to understand just how likely various potential outcomes actually are. —MAT HONAN & ROBIN SLOAN

READING LIST

How to Lie With Statistics, by Darrell Huff
This book is as vital today as it was when it was first published in 1954. An invaluable exploration of grossly distorted graphs, correlation/causation confusion, and sucky sampling.

Calculated Bets, by Steven Skiena
This computer science professor turned his obsession with the obscure sport of jai alai into a rigorous investigation of the power (and limitations) of mathematical modeling.

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and the Markets, by Nassim Nicholas TalebFooled explains why we’re wrong to think that every event has an easily discernible cause, that all winners know why they won, and that all losers deserve to lose.

Counterinsurgency expert who has advised the State Department and military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan

David Kilcullen has said that if he were a Muslim, he’d probably be a jihadist. But he isn’t. In fact, he’s one of the world’s top anti-insurgency experts. “Twenty-Eight Articles,” a paper he wrote that eventually made its way to general David Petraeus, was a series of tips for waging counterinsurgency. Now it’s US strategy. Here are a few examples.

Create a compelling and simple narrative to counter the enemy’s version of events.

Prove that you can provide basic needs better than the insurgency can.

Beware of the impact of global media, including blogs, on your message.

Homework

Determine How Insurance Rates Are Set
Lloyd’s of London estimated insurance for the South African World Cup at a staggering $9 billion. Determine how the agency arrived at that figure, factoring in brand value, endorsements, broadcast rights, and prize money.

Calculate Life Expectancy
Assume you are an average American. Let’s say your risk of dying from heart disease is 40 percent. Now assume that you follow basic recommendations for healthy exercise and diet, reducing your risk by 30 percent. Now assume you have a genetic variation that increases your overall risk by 12 percent. What is your adjusted risk of dying of heart disease?

Daily Kos Versus BigGovernment.com
Find three examples of the same set of numbers presented in entirely different ways on the liberal blog Daily Kos and Andrew Breitbart’s conservative Big Government site. In each case, show which source is using the more aggressive spin and determine which side—if either—is being more honest in its presentation of the facts.

Political Science

Post-State Diplomacy

Why take this course?
As the world becomes evermore atomized, understanding the new leaders and constituencies becomes increasingly important.

What you’ll learn:
How to practice statecraft without states.

rom tribal insurgents to multinational corporations, private charities to pirate gangs, religious movements to armies for hire, a range of organizations now compete with (and sometimes eclipse) the nation-states in which they reside. Without capitals or traditional constituencies, they can’t be persuaded or deterred by traditional tactics.

But that doesn’t mean diplomacy is dead; quite the opposite. Negotiating with these parties requires the same skills as dealing with belligerent nations—understanding the shareholders and alliances they must answer to, the cultures that inform how they behave, and the religious, economic, and political interests they must address.

Power has always depended on who can provide justice, commerce, and stability. Successful insurgents aren’t just thugs; they offer their members tangible benefits—community, money, education, and a sense of order (even if the rebels are the ones creating disorder in the first place). We must learn how they gain loyalty, even if our goal is to undercut it.

ALSO IN THIS DEPARTMENT

POST-STATE CIVICS

Want to know who determines your freedom of speech, commerce, association, and privacy? Don’t look to the Constitution. Instead, turn to the likes of Apple, Facebook, Google, Verizon, and other companies that now establish the limits and mores that define civic life.

In this course, we’ll study how some of the most influential entities on the world stage—religious extremists, criminal enterprises, diasporas—are at their most potent online and must be engaged there. Case in point: the South Ossetia War, in which Russian hackers set up websites that enabled anyone sympathetic to their cause to launch denial-of-service attacks against Georgian targets. We’ll learn how to go about winning over the hearts and minds of these transnational groups. This requires launching sophisticated media and political campaigns—in much the same way that underground samizdat publications and Radio Free Europe broadcasts served to undermine the international Communist movement during the Cold War. —NOAH SHACHTMAN

READING LIST

Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates, by David Cordingly
As this grisly history makes clear, life wasn’t all yo-ho-hos for the original extralegal supranational entrepreneurs.

War 2.0: Irregular Warfare in the Information Age, by Thomas Rid and Marc Hecker
Outlines US, British, and Israeli counterinsurgency tactics, as well as the responses by al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Hezbollah.

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, by P. W. Singer
Explains how private military firms have changed every aspect of modern warfare, from support and planning to combat and hiring.

David Kilcullen
Once upon a time, it was easy to determine who the enemy troops were — they wore the other country’s uniforms. Counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen argues that guerrilla forces aren’t necessarily defined by nation, religion, or even ideology but by circumstance and some rough conception of identity. In this 2009 Google talk, Kilcullen, author of The Accidental Guerrilla, discusses this new breed of warrior.

Sophia Chang | Kilcullen Photo Reference: AP

Humanities

REMIX CULTURE

Why take this course?
Modern artists don’t start with a blank page or empty canvas. They start with preexisting works.

What you’ll learn:
How to analyze—and create—artworks made out of other artworks.

ere are some defining artists of the post-postmodern age: Spike Jonze, whose video for Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” wove the band into an episode of Happy Days; Girl Talk, who turned 322 snippets of recordings into an original album; and Garfield Minus Garfield, a website that erases the eponymous cat from his own comic strip. The creative act is no longer about building something out of nothing but rather building something new out of cultural products that already exist.

In this class, we’ll examine the philosophical roots of remix culture and study seminal works like Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram and Jorge Luis Borges’ Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote. And we’ll examine modern-day exemplars from DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing to Auto-Tune the News.

Next, we’ll take a look at three sets of technological tools that helped democratize art creation.

Writing tools: From the Gutenberg printing press to Microsoft Word, publishing technology has made it easier to reproduce, copy, and manipulate words.

Aural tools: Grandmaster Flash’s turntables and crossfader turned records into instruments. Samplers like the E-Mu SP-1200 and the Akai S950 made prerecorded music a manipulatable musical ingredient. Pro Tools and other software programs made professional-quality sound deconstruction available to the average consumer.

Video tools: From reel-to-reel film editing suites to Avid to iMovie, the process of video editing has grown cheaper and easier, as well.

Finally, students will be asked to create their own manipulations of preexisting works. —JASON TANZ

GUEST LECTURE

Neuro-anatomist and author of My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey

When this Harvard researcher suffered a stroke—a blood vessel burst in the left side of her brain—she was suddenly unable to process verbal language or read. But Taylor also experienced a profound sense of carefree bliss. She applied her professional knowledge to what she was experiencing, eventually writing about the distinct personalities of the two hemispheres of the brain. Her prescription: Spend less time in the linear left half, which gives us our sense of time and self, and more in the pure sensory experience and interconnectedness of the right.

Homework

Write an essay on the role of remake and appropriation in art, focusing on Sherrie Levine’s work After Walker Evans, which was composed of Levine’s photographs of Walker Evans’ photographs (the collection was swiftly confiscated by the Evans estate).

Identify all of the samples in the 1985 hip hop track “Lesson One: The Payoff Mix” by Double Dee & Steinski, and write an essay explaining the textual interplay created by the juxtapositions.

EXTRA CREDIT

Create a unique work using only clips from the 60,000-plus educational, industrial, and amateur films in the Prelinger Archives (archive.org/details/prelinger). If you complete the extra credit assignment, please submit a link to wireduniversity@wired.com.

Neuroscience

Applied Cognition

Why take this course?
You have to know the brain to train the brain.

What you’ll learn:
How the mind works and how you can make it work for you.

ow we think is as important as what we think. The workings of our minds have long been mysterious, but we understand our mental processes much better today than we did 20 years ago. Unfortunately, education hasn’t caught up.

In this course, we’ll get smart on brains, beginning with a sequence on neuro-rhetoric. Ads, political campaigns, and spam have sharpened the art of persuasion and given it a quantitative edge. We’ll read Denis Higgins’ The Art of Writing Advertising and Robert Cialdini’s Influence. We’ll dissect late-night infomercials and Zynga’s games to understand what makes them so compelling.

Next we’ll turn to decisionmaking. We’ll learn how emotion influences reasoning and how language influences emotion. You’ll read Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide and Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice. We’ll study the spread of memes with Facebook’s “in-house sociologist,” Cameron Marlow.

Finally, we’ll delve into the fraught topic of brain maintenance. What nutrients affect mental performance? What drugs provide improved cognition? What can you do today to keep your mind healthy? Many of the most celebrated supplements and tools, from ginkgo biloba to the Nintendo DS game Brain Age, are of limited value. Separating science from the snake oil used to promote these enhancements will tap all the critical thinking skills you sharpen in this course.—ROBIN SLOAN

GUEST LECTURE

Stanford computer scientist and cocreator of the Prefuse and Protovis visualization tools shares tips for building better infographics:

Start with a question, let it evolve
Don’t predetermine what you’re looking for—the most intriguing correlations might get lost.

Let form follow function
Use the variables—position, size, shape, color—that best communicate the underlying data. Bar charts and scatter plots make it easier to compare numeric values. Using different colors can effectively indicate categories but work less well for representing numbers.

Keep it simple
Resist the urge to overwhelm with information. Instead, show just the variables that illustrate your point. If you want to make multiple points, a series of simple graphics will be clearer than a single overloaded visual.

Composition

Writing for New Forms

Why take this course?
You can write a cogent essay, but can you write it in 140 characters or less?

What you’ll learn:
How to adapt your message to multiple formats and audiences—human and machine.

riting used to mean arranging words in a particular order to be printed with ink on the cellulosic entrails of a tree. You wrote for people, and you hoped that the marks you made would leave a permanent impression upon the world. Today, writing can refer to anything from posting a one-line status update on Facebook to dashing off a 10,000-word blog entry. Your readers include not just humans but algorithms, and your goal is not immortality but a momentary piercing of the ever-shifting zeitgeist.

There are more writing opportunities than ever, but they require skills that Strunk and White never dreamed of. This course will teach you how to Photoshop images to create a narrative, edit a 20-second YouTube video, compress your thoughts into 140 characters (or clarify them into a PowerPoint presentation that won’t put your audience to sleep), write a wiki entry that encourages other people to edit and adapt it, and ensure your work goes viral, turning readers into vectors for your ideas.

Technical skills, however, are not enough. Writing successfully requires knowing how to attract niche audiences with depth and detail. To demonstrate this, we’ll contrast The New York Times Magazine‘s profile of Yankee pitcher Mariano Rivera with the accompanying Web video of the nearly 1,300 pitches Rivera threw during the 2009 baseball season.

The role of the writer is also changing. In the age of objectivity, writers kept their personalities out of their work. But now, the author’s identity is paramount; readers have to believe you offer a unique—and trustworthy—perspective. Tone and personality are once again central to writing, not something to be smoothed and scrubbed. We’ll study the work of The Atlantic‘s Andrew Sullivan, who built a blog empire with an informal voice that makes readers feel as if they are accessing his unvarnished thoughts; New York Times blogger Andrew Revkin, who encourages reader loyalty by posting long passages from the emails that they send him; and director Kevin Smith, who recounts sex with his wife in lascivious detail to keep his 1.7 million Twitter followers hitting Refresh.

Writing today also means mastering metatext, the cues and context that determine how, where, and if your words get read. We’ll learn that winning links depends on appealing to the unique tastes of different social networks. Each link will help you attract your most influential audience—the algorithms that determine where your story ends up in Google’s search results. As we optimize our writing for this cyborg readership, we’ll also learn the new tenets of writing well: Be conspicuous, be entertaining, and leave space for others to talk. —ALEXIS MADRIGAL

READING LIST

@ebertchicago Twitter feed
Provides insight into the constant churn of renowned film reviewer Roger Ebert’s mind and erases the distance between critic and audience.

“Charlie Rose by Samuel Beckett” YouTube video
Cleverly edited clip makes it look like the PBS host is interviewing himself, then veers into awkward pauses, absurd interjections, and a mounting sense of despair. This mashup starts out amusing but turns haunting; it proves you don’t need a pen to describe the void.

Jeffrey Heer
Composing an effective infographic requires a lot more than slapping bars and lines together. In this talk at the University of Washington, Stanford professor Jeffrey Heer outlines some different techniques for getting your message across.

GUEST LECTURE

Griffith knew his energy consumption was harming the planet but assumed he was more conscientious than most people. Then he crunched the numbers, taking every aspect of his life into account, and discovered that he was much, much worse than others. Now he heads up WattzOn, an online service that helps people track their own energy consumption.

Economics

Waste Studies

Why take this course?
Waste is the single biggest drag on our productivity—and it’s everywhere.

What you’ll learn:
How to become a smarter consumer, investor, and conserver.

hen trying to understand a country’s health, economists have a lot of numbers to pick from: GDP, consumer confidence, the balance of trade. But they could learn more by looking at the total amount of waste produced.

Waste isn’t just garbage (though there’s a lot of that: The US produces 250 million tons of it annually). Each year, we lose billions of dollars in valuable time as we sit in traffic and endless meetings. We spend billions more in health premiums that pay for administrative bloat rather than medical care. High unemployment rates constitute another kind of waste—available labor that isn’t being put to productive economic use.

Waste, of course, is a simple fact of nature: It’s baked right into the second law of thermodynamics. Instead of seeking to eliminate it, we need to learn what causes it, how to reduce it, and what purpose it might serve.

To see how devastating unchecked waste can be, we’ll examine the recent economic collapse. The financial markets were overcome by derivatives that took in billions of dollars without performing any benefit to the overall economy. Those wasteful innovations—like risky subprime mortgage pools—were instrumental in causing the worst economic slump since the Great Depression.

We’ll learn how engineers, industrialists, and economists are finding new ways to reduce waste. “Smart” meters tell people how much power their appliances are consuming; as energy customers become more aware of their consumption, they use less. Companies like GE and Intel are spending billions of dollars to improve the efficiency of their turbines and computer chips.

Finally, we’ll take a more nuanced look at waste, asking how much we can eliminate and how much is necessary for a healthy economy. Some level of oversupply is required to insure against catastrophe, just as having two kidneys provides a backup in case one fails. And economists have concluded that some level of unemployment—perhaps the cruelest form of waste—is necessary to prevent runaway inflation. —FELIX SALMON

Saul Griffith
When Saul Griffith set out to calculate his energy usage, the eco-conscious inventor assumed he wasted less than the average American. Instead, he used much, much more. In this talk at the 2008 PopTech conference, Griffith shows how he determined that even his seemingly innocuous lifestyle generated tons of wasted energy.

LAB SCHEDULE

Vocational Studies

Domestic Tech

Why take this course?
We’ve lost touch with the act of making, repairing, and upgrading physical objects.

What you’ll learn:
How to apply hard science and engineering to everyday life.

n 20th-century high schools, shop and home economics classes were considered easy As—or worse, one-way tickets to unexciting vocations. But we’ve become divorced from the skills those classes imparted. This course reexamines every aspect of home life, from cooking to cabinet repair, through the prism of science.

In the 18th century, it was common for curious amateurs to carry out experiments in their home. We’ll study the history, from philosophers John Locke and Benjamin Franklin to mythbusters Kari Byron and Jamie Hyneman. We will explore outfits like DIYbio and Foldit, which are tapping into that same spirit today.

The High Tech Home Ec sequence will cover kitchen chemistry and nutrition, providing a better understanding of how science can help you perform the simplest of tasks, like boiling an egg. (If the yolk turns greenish-gray, the iron in it has reacted with the sulfur in the egg white. To arrest this process, don’t overcook, and place the eggs in cold water as soon as they are off the boil.)

The Domestic Shop sequence will demonstrate the astounding range of experiments and projects you can do with household appliances. (No lab fee—the lab is your home and the world around you.)—PATRICK DI JUSTO